by Ed West
In 407 the Roman legions pulled out of Britain. Sometime later, and desperately under threat from German tribes now attacking in much larger numbers, the British leaders appealed to Rome again: “To Agitius, thrice consul: the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.”22 The empire, or what was left of it, replied that the Britons must take care of their own affairs, for Rome could no longer help. The city itself would not be spared the cataclysm: the last emperor, the boy Romulus Augustulus, stepped down in 476, deposed by a barbarian king.
A century later, when Pope Gregory the Great established papal control of the city, one that would bring it a new empire—this one spiritual—it was home to just a few thousand souls nestling in the ruins of a millennium of greatness, a ruin of goatherds and livestock. To a visitor from Rome’s past it would have looked like a cataclysm had befallen the city even if, unlike in Martin’s world, it was one created by men.
And then came the ten years without summer.
*Father and son were played by Alec Guinness and Christopher Plummer in The Fall of the Roman Empire and by Richard Harris and Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator. Maximus was fictional.
*The Game of Thrones backstory has its equivalent, Garth Greenhand, first lord of First Men to cross to Westeros who is supposed to have had an improbable number of children and descendants.
8
BEYOND THE WALL
I met some wildlings when I was a boy. They were fair thieves but bad hagglers. All in all, they seemed like any other men, some fair, some foul.
—DAVOS SEAWORTH
By the sword’s edge or the spear’s point they slaughtered the sick in their beds, women who were pregnant or in labor, babies in their cradles or at their mothers’ breast and sometimes they killed the mothers too. They slaughtered worn-out old men, feeble old women . . . They killed husbands in front of their wives. Then they carried off their plunder and the women, both widows and maidens, stripped, bound and roped together they drove them off, goading them with spears on the way. Their fate was either to be kept as slaves or sold on to other barbarians in exchange for cattle.
So wrote the northern English chronicler Richard of Hexham in 1138 after the Scots had piled over the border, causing mayhem and terror.
The Wildlings are a diverse bunch, speaking seven different languages and varying culturally, from tribes who are very similar to the people of the North, to out-and-out savages who eat human flesh. Likewise, the raiders of 1138 would have spoken a number of tongues, including variations of Gaelic, Pictish, Brythonic, the Anglian dialect Lallands and, among their leaders, Norman French. This elite of two hundred Norman noblemen led an array of archers and spearmen from across the different tribes of Scotland, including Picts, Scots, Gaels, Lowlanders, Highlanders, and Islanders, but worst of all the notorious Galwegians, who still fought naked.
In the words of one historian: “No doubt all the motley host of Scots and English [English-speaking Scots], of Norwegians from Orkney and the Isles, of Normans and even Germans and Danes contributed to this orgy of cruelty, but all accounts agree that the Picts of Galloway, ‘those bestial men,’ were the perpetrators of the worst and most unspeakable horrors of this grim campaign.”1
The Scots were regarded with horror in England, just as the Wildings were in the Realm. The men of the North in particular hated those beyond the wall, and to them the only thing worse than the Scots’ love of violence was their habit of raiding for slaves.
When the northern English army came to meet them, on August 22, 1138 at the Battle of the Standard, they faced the terrifying spectacle of the nude Galwegians, from the part of Scotland facing Ireland and “renowned for such habits as braining babies on doorposts.”2 Behind them were spearmen from Cumbria, speakers of the old Brythonic language that elsewhere evolved into Welsh, as well as Lowlanders and fighters from Aberdeenshire on the northeast coast, most of them fishermen. The battle began with the blowing of Scottish horns, followed by three howls, the spur for the Galwegians to charge, the naked savages drumming their spears on their shields. The English fired at them with their bows, and “the arrows flew like the densest rain, rushing into the breasts of those who stood in the way, sticking into their faces and eyes.”3 One Galwegian could be seen “bristling all round with arrows and nonetheless brandishing his sword and in blind madness rushing forward [to] smite a foe [and] lash the air with useless strokes.”4 Soon the Galwegians fled and the Scottish king was dragged away by his knights, while the rest of his army ran off, now the prey of the local populace.
Raiding from beyond the border dated back to at least the eleventh century, and one writer recorded a 1070 attack in which King Malcolm “commanded them no longer to spare any of the English nation, but either to slay them all or drive them away under the yoke of perpetual slavery . . . Old men and women were either beheaded by swords or stuck with spears like pigs destined for the table . . . Babes were tossed high in the air, and caught on the spikes of spears. Malcolm watched all these things without pity; merely ordering his slave-drivers to make haste.”5 King Malcolm “Canmore” (Great Chief) raided England five times from 1058 to 1093, until killed in the last invasion.
The Scots came to burn and steal and enslave, one contemporary lamented, so that “the young men and the young women and whoever seemed suitable for work and toil were driven bound before the enemy . . . Scotland was filled with English slaves and handmaidens, so that even now no little village, nor even homestead, is without them.”6 When the wild men turned up, northern villagers would make for a safe refuge, a church being an obvious choice, where the monks’ prayer would compete with the cries of newborns and the sound of livestock.
However, the Norman Conquest of England led to a great increase in the number of castles going up across the country; the first in the north was Durham, built in 1072, and the New Castle followed in 1080, erected on the River Tyne following one of Canmore’s raids and giving its name to the region’s largest city. Soon after came Carlisle, on the western edge of the Wall. Otherwise people would hide in the hills or forests. Aware of this ploy, the Scots might pretend to leave, only to wait for the English to come out, as they did in 1070.
Although Wildings can speak the Common Tongue used south of the wall, the equivalent of English, some groups—such as the Thenn—still converse in the Old Tongue. Likewise, Gaelic culture and language flourished in the mountains and islands of Scotland until the eighteenth century and the Highland clearances, at which point their clannish society was crushed forever.
Hadrian’s Wall had been put up by the Romans to keep out Caledonian tribes and today is close enough to serve as a metaphor for the Anglo-Scottish border. However, although the walls in both fiction and reality remain central psychological barriers between rival cultures, in real life it was not Hadrian’s Wall that remained culturally significant, but the more northerly Antonine, built over the thinnest point in Scotland’s central belt. Although little of the actual structure survives, and it was in fact abandoned after only a few years, it better (although not perfectly) marks the division between the historically English and Celtic-speaking areas of northern Britain.
After the fall of Rome, a Germanic tribe, the Angles, overwhelmed the land on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall. Further north Alba, or Scotland, had been united in the ninth century, through a marriage alliance between the Gaelic-speaking Scots of the west, who originally came from Ireland, and the indigenous Picts in the northeast. Lothian, the south-east of Scotland, had been part of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, and stretched as far as Din Eidyn, which became Edinburgh in the seventh century; the court of that city had always spoken the Anglian tongue, developing into the English dialect called Lallands (“lowlands”). Northumbria and Lothian were “linguistically, socially, and economically indistinguishable,”7 and the latter was described as being “in the land of the English and in the kingdom of the
Scots.”8
In the tenth century, the southern kings of Wessex had conquered all the English-speaking kingdoms from the Vikings but, finding it too far out of their sphere, conceded Lothian to the Scots instead. It included the strategic point of Castle Rock, the site of a former volcano that controlled the Firth of Forth and which became Edinburgh Castle. Castle Rock was at the very end of the Great North Road from London, and whoever controlled it effectively controlled central and southern Scotland.
So the division between the Wildlings and the knee-benders is inspired not just by the difference between Scots and English, but between Scots Highlanders and English-speakers—both Scots and English—of whom Highlanders made no distinction. The Scots Gaelic word for the English, Sassenach—literally “Saxon”—originally applied to both.
In return, the English-speaking people of the Scottish Lowlands regarded the Highlanders with terror and disgust. Andrew Wyntoun called them “wyld wykkyd Heland-men”9 while John of Fordun, writing in the fourteenth century, said: “The lowlanders are home-loving, civilized, trustworthy, tolerant and polite, dress decently and are affable and pious. The islanders and highlanders are a wild untamed people, primitive and proud, given to plunder and the easy life, clever and quick to learn, handsome in appearance but slovenly in dress.”10
But the people of Northumberland were terrified of both the Lowlanders and Highlanders, and their occasional raids against the “Southrons”. This term, once used by northern English as a term for southerners, was also used by the Scots for the English generally, just as it is used in Westeros by people from the North for those south of the Neck, and by Wildlings for anyone south of the Wall.
In the wilder terrain north of the border wolves were still common; they had once been widespread across the island, but were now in retreat after determined attempts to eliminate the animals. Anglo-Saxon kings as far back as the tenth century would demand wolf skins as tribute, while criminals might escape execution in return for a certain number of the dead beasts. Edward I embarked on a policy of exterminating wolves from his kingdom, although it was not until the Tudor period when they were finally driven out of England.
The wolf is “an enduring symbol of terror in the Western European imagination. The wolf howl in the dark forest, the noiseless padding of the creature around the winter homestead, even the big, bad wolf of fairy tale all speak to an ancient fear of what awaits us in the wilderness.”11 As well as being a danger to children and livestock, wolves also often scavenged over the corpses left by men in war; at the Battle of Waterfirth in the eleventh century, fought between Gaels and Norsemen, the poet Arnor sang that afterwards “There I saw the grey wolf gaping, O’er the wounded corse of many a man.”12
They survived beyond the wall for longer; up until the early modern era large areas of Scotland were densely wooded forests in which wolves were abundant, and it was not until these woods were cleared in the seventeenth century that they were driven to their doom. Indeed, in the Highlands wolves were such a menace that people were often buried on small islands where the animals could not dig up the corpses. Dire wolves also really existed, once found in North America before their extinction ten thousand years ago; canis dirus were bigger than other species of wolves, although not quite as gigantic as the creatures in Westeros, and their interaction with humans was brief and painful.13
“THERE SITS THE ONLY KING I MEAN TO BOW MY KNEE TO, M’LORDS. THE KING IN THE NORTH!”
Scottish royal politics had always been absurdly violent. King Duncan was slain by his uncle Donald the White in 1094, while Donald was killed and mutilated in 1097 when the exiled Anglo-Saxon leader Edgar the Atheling helped put his Scottish-born nephew Edgar on the Scottish throne. Before them all Macbeth had taken the crown through victory in battle, not by murder as in Shakespeare’s telling, and his end was also predictably bloody.
Things somewhat improved after the Scottish monarchs began to intermarry with the English and French aristocracy, bringing them more into the European mainstream. Malcolm Canmore’s English wife Margaret, later made a saint, insisted that slaves be ransomed by their families. Her son King David returned his own slaves.
By the fourteenth century, the border was heavily militarized, with hundreds of “pele” towers, small fortified houses with walls seven to ten feet thick, as well as a number of castles. The people in northern villages would bring their goods into the castle for safe keeping when attacks came. However, whereas previously the Scots could only plunder the north, with the invention of castles they might conquer it, if they could capture the fortresses. David I had done just that, occupying five castles after crossing the border with a great army. His grandson William the Lion had invaded England in 1173 and tried to take Northumberland, before eventually being repulsed. By this time, Scotland had come heavily under the influence of the French, and their armies included mercenaries from continental Europe, mainly Flanders. So now the Scottish and English knights, both of Norman origin, fought each other under the laws of chivalry, having duels and being ransomed when captured. And yet the wild Galwegians regarded the knights leading them as no different to the enemy, so that when King William was captured at Alnwick they immediately headed back to their native land and destroyed all the castles he had built and killed all the “newcomers,” Frenchmen, they could find.
Other parts of the isles took longer to come into the European mainstream. In the thirteenth century, the royal Scottish army defeated “unarmored and naked” Manxmen, the last part of the isles where war was done au naturel.
And in the far north of Britain, things would not have been remarkably different from a millennium before. According to the thirteenth century Chronicle of the Kings of Man and the Isles, the inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis lived “mostly by hunting and fishing, for the land is mountainous and rocky, almost all of it unfit for tillage” The Gaelic speakers shared this region with Vikings, some of whom still lived by raiding as late as the twelfth century. Svein Asleifarson, lord of Orkney, would sow his seed in the spring and, “that done, he would go off plundering in the Hebrides and Ireland on what he called the ‘spring trip.’” He returned in time to gather in the harvest, then he would raid for his “fall trip.”14 Warned by the local leader to put an end to this rather old-fashioned behaviour, Svein ignored him and headed off to Dublin for a raid—where he was brutally killed.
And despite considerable advances, Scotland at the time of the cousins’ war in England was certainly less developed than the lands further south. In the 1430s, papal envoy Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, visited what was then still a place on the edge of civilization. He wrote: “It is a cold land, of few fruitful plants and is, for the most part, barren of trees. In the earth there is a sulphurous rock which they dig up to feed their fires. Their communities have no surrounding walls and their houses are most often constructed without mortar and have roofs covered with turf, while in the countryside the doorways are shut off with ox hide. The people, who are poor and uneducated, fill themselves up with meat and fish but only eat bread as a delicacy . . . They do not have wine, other than what they import . . . It is said that there are two Scotlands, one cultivated, the other wooded and without fields. The Scots that live in the wooded part speak in a different tongue and sometimes eat tree-bark.”15 The meat-eaters he met would have been the very richest of the aristocracy; for the vast majority of people, oats were their daily fare, if they were lucky.
The country increasingly became Anglicized and might have been absorbed were it not for King Edward’s invasion; instead, there was written a national story of resistance to unite the disparate tribes north of the Wall. And the climax came in the year of 1314, when the Scots defeated an invading army, one of three crucial battles that heralded the beginning of the end for the medieval world.
The old order in Europe had in fact begun to crumble on May 18, 1302 when Philippe the Fair’s army marched north to crush the Flemish, confident of an easy victory against a small
but industrious people on the kingdom’s edge. Across the cold North Sea from southern England, Flanders was low-lying and not naturally rich in resources—Vlaanderen comes from the old Dutch word for flooded—but despite poor soil and a very high-water table, the Flemish had turned swamps into towns and sheep pastures, building a cloth industry that brought them great rewards. Along with northern Italy, Flanders was now the wealthiest part of Europe, its GDP per capita 20 percent greater than France and 25 percent better than England. Unusually, some 40 percent of its people lived in towns, one of the effects of which was that their militias could regularly drill together, unlike the mostly rural French.
For centuries the European order had rested on knights, aristocratic warriors who fought on horseback. This form of warfare had been mastered by the Franks from about the seventh century, and later the Normans perfected the cavalry charge, a terrifying prospect to anyone facing it. Against mounted cavalry the infantry stood little chance—as the English discovered to their cost at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. From the time of the First Crusade (1095-1099), horsemen also carried lances thirteen feet long with very sharp leaf-shaped steel blades, which caused terror among infantry soldiers.
A man was nothing without his horse, and a mount with the right traits was highly prized. It was said that a horse should have fifteen qualities, three each of a man, woman, fox, hare, and ass—so like a man bold, proud, and hardy, and like a woman fair breasted, fair of hair, and easy to lie upon. A war horse, or destrier, cost thirty-six times as much as an average farm animal, weighed up to 1400 lbs and could carry 300 lbs on their backs.